Thursday, October 22, 2015

Creating a Digital Business Platform

Is it too early to pick a digital business platform or will many bet on multiple horses in the race? I would suggest that organizations come up with a logical architecture and then later pick the vendors that will get you to an excellent digital business platform. That architecture will depend on what your business will need and what your leadership and culture will tolerate. If you are a "pick a mega vendor and follow them" type of organization, the architecture can help you influence the direction of the mega vendor(s) you have selected. Don't forget understanding your existing assets and figuring out how you might leverage them as well. I have created a jump start architecture chart that points to the kinds of platforms to consider when creating your logical architecture. Each platform type brings strengths and challenges.

Application Platforms: These are business application driven platforms that have adapted to support some of business and technical needs of the new digital world.

Process Platforms: These are process and application composition platforms that support agile process applications with significant operational visibility.

Analytic Platforms: These are algorithm or cognitive driven to support decision or knowledge work.

Integration Platforms: These are platforms that bring data, system and event islands together for application, analytic and process platforms to further leverage to sense, decide and act.

Internet of Things Platforms: These platforms support machine to machine communications as well as machine to system communications. They emit events for the integration platforms

Net; Net:

Ready or not, the decision for your digital architecture and vendors will be coming up soon, if you haven't had to face creating a digital business platform yet. Start with a logical architecture and drill down to build a feature list when the time comes.